Trying to Make Contact

Only 2,783 people will come to the stadium on this night to watch the Blue Crabs lose their third straight game, after which Hobson will go back to his host family's home, where he lives in the basement.

'Bama to Boston

Hobson grew up near Tuscaloosa, Ala., and lived every Alabama boy's dream by age 19. He played quarterback, albeit as a backup, for Bear Bryant at the University of Alabama.

But Hobson always loved baseball. As a child, he would turn his mother's old broomsticks into bats, pretending to be Mickey Mantle as he lofted rocks to himself and cracked them across the river behind his house. In college, he spent summer weekends sticking out his thumb along Interstate 59, hoping to get to Birmingham for summer baseball games. He played anywhere, even that old ballfield in Bibb County, Ala., the same place his daddy used to play as a kid, the one that had railroad tracks running through center field.

Two baseball scouts from Cincinnati noticed Hobson -- the kid who could swing a good bat and was willing to throw his body all over the field to make a play -- before his senior year at Alabama and told him he might have a future in the game. He decided then to give up football and two years later, in 1975, having been drafted into the Red Sox organization, received a call-up to the majors.

Fans in Boston loved Hobson because he was the type to dive headlong into the seats after a foul ball or bulldoze an opposing catcher at the plate.

But injuries cut short Hobson's playing career. Years of crashing on AstroTurf as an Alabama football player chipped bone in his elbow. By the 1979 season, he had three bone shards in his arm so large he had to rearrange them, just so, to throw a baseball.

Hobson's eight-year major league career ended in 1982. He turned to managing in the minor leagues later that decade and was named the International League manager of the year in 1991 with the Class AAA Pawtucket Red Sox. A year later, on the strength of several in-house recommendations and a 1 1/2 -hour interview, he was asked to manage the Boston Red Sox. The team struggled to a .472 winning percentage in his tenure, and the Hobson family stopped receiving the local newspapers because "they either really loved him or really hated him," his wife, Krystine, says. At the end, they hated Hobson, and he was fired after three seasons with the Red Sox.

Hobson returned to managing in the minor leagues, and it was on a road trip in Pawtucket, R.I. -- the same place he was noticed as a promising young manager five years earlier, the same place where his likeness is painted as a six-foot mural in its minor league stadium -- that Butch Hobson's life took another turn.

Derailed by Drugs

Hobson says he had been in a club in Chicago in the 1970s with friends, and people were partying hard. It was there, with people snorting lines off tables around him, that Hobson says he first tried cocaine.

"I have a very addictive personality, and I know that, and then it took hold of me," he says. "I remember thinking that this is pretty cool. But that's what you think as a young athlete. You think you can't get caught. You think you can do what you want to and nobody's going to do anything about it. You think you're beyond getting in trouble."

Hobson says he lived that way for years and that it might be the reason his first marriage didn't work. He spent his time in a cabin near his home, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone, drinking and doing drugs.

"It got to the point where that part of my life, that seemed to be a priority," he says.